General Life Whatnot – Page 6

May 29, 2014General Life Whatnot Self-Employment Writing

Sometimes it just works out

A friend of mine gave me a really lovely plant about a year ago. Unlike many plants I’ve owned, I watered it, and it didn’t die. Quite the opposite. It grew. I didn’t realize quite how much until I was moving into a new location recently, and one big, long branch of the plant, which had grown against the window, broke right off when I pulled it away from its support. Half the plant was gone. The flowering half.

Dammit. Even the plants I think I’m not killing, I end up killing. I was about to throw the branch away when I thought, “What can it hurt to stick the stump of this branch into the dirt?”

May 6, 2014May 5, 2014General Life Whatnot Writing

What’s inspiring me right now

Inspiration is everywhere this week. Here’s where I’ve found it.

Aldi flowers. A person with fresh cut flowers on display in her home at all times is something so far removed from something I aspired to be that I’d hardly put a single thought into it before. Fresh flowers are expensive, and also die, making their existence seem rather inexcusable in my book. Then, on a whim one day, I examined the flowers at the Aldi checkout line, and they were $3.99. Not $20. $3.99. So I bought some. And I have continued to buy them every time I go, so now I have officially become a person with fresh cut flowers on display in her home at all times, and GUESS WHAT? It’s a goddam delight.

April 30, 2014April 30, 2014General Life Whatnot Self-Employment Writing

Freelancer Fears: Money talk

Talking about money is the wooooooooooorst. Even as freelance writer who must measure absolutely everything I do by how much it pays if I want to eat and sleep inside, it kills me to broach the subject of pay. I’m not alone on this. For whatever reason, most Americans not only don’t talk about their finances, they’d prefer to discuss politics, religion or death over money. Multiply that Americanism by being Midwestern, and talking about payment with publishers is practically paralyzing for me.

My professional money talk anxiety began decade ago (a decade ago!), when I wrote a weekly bar review column for a local paper in Lansing. Every week, I went to a bar, wrote my little thingy, and I’d get a $60 check in the mail. One week, it didn’t come. I decided to wait and see if it was late. When my next check came on schedule, followed by the next — with no mention of the missing funds — I panicked. I was 22, living paycheck to paycheck. I really needed that $60. How could I ask for it? What if they just thought that bar review was super bad and decided not to pay me for it? What if the error was on my end and now it was too late to fix? What if my editor thought I was stingy for making a thing over $60 and then hated me and stopped giving me work and my dream of writing for a living was dashed? Over $60?!